[creativecupcak3]

Recent College grad here(January, 2020): I thought I was crazy being one of the few people that tried to stay the hell away from Amazon. I've heard so many mixed reviews about their working culture. I spent six years in college and absolutely don't want a company like Amazon to make me hate myself as a programmer. Programming is very dear to my heart and I only want to use it for good.

[mjayhn]

Congrats on graduating! I started my career during the 2008 recession. I hope things are going more smoothly for you.

My biggest advice and what I wish I'd known back then or heeded better:

Networking will be your savior during this. Find open source projects that you're passionate about and work toward contributing to them. Just help out where and when you can, even if it's just helping to moderate chats, webinars, etc. Depending on the size and organization of the project you'll meet and work with other contributors that use that project in their day-to-day lives at their companies in production. These will be your feet in the door at companies that actually use your passion-project plus you'll learn an incredible amount through osmosis.

A lot of open source projects bring in interns, GSOC, etc type of stuff. They won't expect you to hit home runs. Don't be upset if you're put on documentation duty or editing in the beginning. We all need those skills and some of us engineers get so in the weeds that we forget how to do those more soft skills.

You probably already know all this, I have no idea what compsci courses are like, I didn't have the opportunity to partake in college.

Best of luck bud.